what's sovereignty worth to me, anyway?

[sciatrix]

So muccamukk hosted a set of questions for the Fediverse over at her blog today, and impertinence has done a really nice job of answering them from the perspective of social systems, moderation, and how communities attempting to avoid worst-case-scenarios really work.

I think, though, that I'm still uneasy, and I'm fundamentally uneasy because to me what I am hearing echoed from the various Fediverse/p2p/Mastodon schools of How Fandom Should Do Next is that the future of fandom should be decentralized and spread around many small communities, each maintained and monitored by a few moderators. Like a set of fiefdoms, but administered without hereditary rule, with mobile users who can transfer allegiances from one fiefdom to another quickly--at least in theory.

I think I am uneasy because I am concerned about handing out ultimate power--as opposed to social power--to many different people of unpredictable ethics and morality, with limited ability to leave a toxic space without abandoning friends and limited ways of getting in touch with people who follow. I'm going to talk out loud for a minute to see if I can pin that down.

One of the things I like about the structure of Dreamwidth is that the communities that do form here, and around individual users, are like... a series of connected salons, with both personal and public spaces for everyone, such that anything I post to my personal journal is mine and mine alone and anything I post to a community is surrendered to the moderators of that community, who I can know and trust ahead of time without ever necessarily stepping under their authority, just by reading publicly. It is not clear to me that you can do that on these decentralized fediverse systems.

Another thing I like is that the ultimate authority on how a service will be hosted and moderated is not someone who is modding the individual communities, such that relationships breakdowns with a moderator of a particular community has zero impact on my ability to interact with the rest of Dreamwidth. The odds that I will fall into a personal acrimony with denise or mark is slim to none; they straight up don't have the personal bandwidth to necessarily notice me as a person, and I feel safer in that anonymity.

Metafilter is the inverse of that, in some ways--it's a service where the site owner is also an active moderator, and where he and the mod team really do publicly interact in places where I might converse with them anywhere, and my ability to speak on the site at all is definitely mediated by my being a member in good standing with those mods--but also, I can see them and observe them and decide whether I trust the judgement of the MeFi mod team beforehand. I trust that even when I disagree with them, they'll still be decent people to me, and I can do that based on long observance.

So why am I uneasy about a fediverse instance while I'm comfortable on Metafilter, which operates (as far as I can tell) like one enormous federated instance? I cut my teeth on forums; why am I balking at this?

...oh.

Oh, oh, oh.

I've watched so many dysfunctional forums, is the thing, with a lot of dysfunctional modding carried out by people who had neither the skill nor the confidence to have any business modding, who didn't know how to manage a community and didn't take community stewardship seriously as its own thing. I've made the decision to leave forums based on moderation and known grimly that unless things were bad enough to take a significant fraction of users with me--and at one point, I was in that situation!--that I was giving up a lot of my ability to get back in touch with people later, including people who I was really fond of, and that my friendships would have to be very strong indeed to survive a platform migration.

I'm thinking of fediverse as like the old forum systems, but without the option to lurk before deciding to trust someone, and with spinning up a new forum also including some outlay of actual hard cash, so that fewer people can try it.

Woof.

No wonder I'm feeling cagey.

Comments

[sciatrix]

Mmmmmmmmmmhm. I sometimes think that especially the kind of Linux-friendly no-one's-gonna-control-me decentralization-is-the-way-to-go types underweight the costs of learning all of the poorly documented home-made tools that everyone pays, because those sorts of folks a) are usually experts in the platform types and generally coding specialists of some stripe, so maintaining this expertise is literally part of their day job and relatively cheap, and b) overweight the costs of centralization relative to the rest of fandom, such that the costs of decentralizing seem a small price to pay, because c) they seem to be less reliant on social networks qua social networks of the variety where the time spent maintaining them is a valuable investment and anything that disrupts those networks can be a heavy price indeed.

I just. There is a very toxic-masculinity flavor of devaluing lasting social connections and the inevitable disruption to those connections that comes with any platform shift of attention that makes me purse my lips and squint.

Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.

[melannen]

Yep.

I do think one of the things fediverse does better than what we're comparing it too is that it's *supposed* to be pretty easy to switch servers without disrupting your social connections, but I think that only remains true as long as the different servers are all basically the same, in terms of both tech and moderation. And we see how long that lasted with the LJ instances.

(That the answer to the question of what happens if the software versions on different implentations start to drift apart was "if they aren't running the most recent version nobody should talk to them anyway" didn't make me... optimistic, on how well this will scale if we get to the point where we run out of linux-y types to run all the servers. Not to mention the idea that linux-y types can keep it going without forking all over the place... Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

[kore]

Being a librarian makes me kind of militant on the topic of "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!")

BLESS

I'm always reminded of that bit in Stephenson's Command Line where he tries opening an earlier Word document with a later Word program and gets gibberish. Not a good thing!

[silveradept]

Cheers to backwards compatibility as a social justice issue. And, as a fellow librarian, we both know that it's often a matter of necessity as well for making sure that our user bases can still interact with the world around them.

[sylvaine]

I think I want "backwards compatibility is a social justice issue!" on a t shirt. *g*

[melannen]

I would wear that shirt!

[kore]

Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.

I want this on a t-shirt.

[jesse_the_k]

“Disruption for disruption's sake is not a neutral good.”

I remember when it was a “fun challenge.” (I was younger and healthier.) I don’t know if it’sinherently gendered, but I do know that fiddling around with code will always be more attractive to some folks than reaching Finnish consensus

[sciatrix]

What's Finnish consensus? *chinhands*

And oh yeah, agree re: fiddling around with code. Hell, that coding gets more and more attractive to me as I age--it's less emotionally exhausting! And I can take breaks from it!

[jesse_the_k]

“Finnish” is “fannish” in iOS’ mundane little autocorrect AI.

The hazards of reply by email is that my SPAG* register plunges to txtish.

*spelling and grammar

**checked three times but I bet there’s still an error here

[sciatrix]

LOL okay, fair fair!